Spell Casting with Heart & Spirit is a short comic by Ian Anderson, aka Citric Comics, previously posted on his blog, but available now as a 60 page downloadable PDF, combined with The Best Part another short comic.
“60 Pages of comics between two stories! Spell Casting With Heart & Spirit is about a Witch and a Duck talking about magic and The Best Part is about a little dog looking for rare gems.
Two tales about creativity and making stuff in comics form!”
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Jethro Tull’s Aqualung (33 1/3) by Allan F Moore, book 14 in the 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury Academic:
Author Allan Moore (just one L, not the celebrated comics writer) heads up a university department of music and sound recording, and it shows in this study of the Jethro Tull album Aqualung. Writing for a popular audience, Moore takes some care not to get too musically arcane, and he explains technical terms as he introduces them. Even so, there are a few passages in the book where his discussion of chord sequences made my eyes glaze over a bit, and I’m enough of a musician to have played many of those chords myself out of a Jethro Tull sheet music book I have.
One aspect of the musical discussion that I found very worthwhile was consideration of the “sound box” — i.e. the virtual acoustic environment engineered through stereo sound — in tandem with the instrumentation and other recording effects. I’ve read one other volume in this “33 1/3” series about the masterpieces of audio vinyl, and this element didn’t come up in that case.
Besides the musical features of Aqualung, a chief part of its incontrovertible lyrical and semiotic substance is a struggle with/over religion. In this case, the lack of sophistication in Moore’s treatment might be due to either his trepidation about confronting readers with difficult religious ideas, or his own anemic grasp of them. Anyhow, while he makes a few interesting points on these lines — such as his consideration of the charcters in “Locomotive Breath,” — he ultimately doesn’t do justice to Ian Anderson’s perversely pious and profound confrontation with conventional Christianity.
Still, the whole book is a quick read, and if its only effect had been to motivate me to reacquaint myself with a terrific album of music, it would have been well worth my time. [via]
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